A Jungian Psychological Perspective on Guilt
by Lawrence H. Staples.
ISBN 9780977607648 (ISBN 10: 097760764X) Index, Biblio, 248 pp., 2008.
Product Description
In Guilt with a Twist Lawrence Staples bumps us up against the 'tip of the guiltberg' and then guides us down into the murky depths of our beings were the raging, or occasionally subtle, sources of guilt are discovered—good, bad, and at times even indifferent.
With a spirit similar to what moved Galileo, Copernicus, Socrates, Rosa Parks, and Susan B. Anthony to violate conventional boundaries, Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way suggests that 'Good Guilt' is incurred for the sins we need to commit if we are to grow and reach our full potential as individuals, as well as a society. "'Sins' that benefit us," Staples claims, "could not be committed without a creative, Promethean spirit that is supported by an obstinate and irreverent insolence toward authority that is informed by a love of freedom."
Staples shows us how guilt may not particularly feel so 'good' at the time of a transgression, yet in retrospect the perceived 'sin' that originated feelings of guilt often turns out to be of great value materially, as well as spiritually. This timely publication sheds light and brings valuable meaning to feelings that for ages humanity has deemed 'bad' and undesirable and will benefit many who suffer from life's existential pains brought on by divorce, separations, addictions, and a host of socially imposed rules that crush the spirits of those who challenge prejudice attitudes toward race, religion, gender, and other social norms.
About the Author
Lawrence Staples has a Ph.D. in psychology; his special areas of interest are the problems of midlife, guilt, and creativity. Dr. Staples is a diplomate of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, Switzerland, and also holds AB and MBA degrees from Harvard. In addition to Guilt with a Twist, Lawrence is author of the popular book The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness.

The choice is always ours. Then, let me choose
The longest art, the hard Promethean way
Cherishingly to tend and feed and fan
That inward ﬁre, whose small precarious ﬂame,
Kindled or quenched, creates
The noble or ignoble men we are,
The worlds we live in, and the very fates—
Our bright or muddy star.
—Aldous Huxley
1

xv
OVERVIEW
We have to sin and incur guilt if we are to grow and reach
our full potential. That’s the central message of this book. It
is a message that is inspired and informed by the myth
a
of
Prometheus. Myth tells us Prometheus stole ﬁre from the gods
and made it available for use by humans. He suffered for his
sin. Zeus had him chained to a rock where an eagle pecked
and tore daily at his liver. But human society would have
suffered if he had not committed it. Thus, the life of Prometheus
portrays a mythological model for guilt that is different from
the conventional view. The Promethean model of guilt suggests
the importance of sinning and incurring guilt in order to obtain
needed—but forbidden things.
The conventional view of guilt is that it helps us remain
“good.” Guilt keeps us within boundaries deemed acceptable.
It helps us resist doing things that would disturb or harm our
individual and collective interests. It can remind us of the
apology we should make to help repair a harm we may have
done. This conventional view of guilt has an important role in
the maintenance of conventional life.
The conventional view, important as it is, also creates an
enormous problem. It can deter us from being “bad” when that
is exactly what is needed. While the conventional view is part
of the truth, it is not the whole truth. The meaning of sin and
guilt is far more complicated.
If individuals could not sin, and then suffer the subsequent
guilt, they could not fully develop themselves and their gifts.
If individuals could not develop fully, neither could society, as
society is a sum of the individuals that comprise it. If, however,

a
The Promethean myth provides a picture of an important aspect of
humanity’s experience of guilt. Prometheus stole ﬁre from the Gods
on Olympus and brought it back to earth for the beneﬁt of mankind.
Zeus had him bound to a rock where eagles pecked at his liver daily.
Eventually, Zeus allowed Hercules to free him from his suffering.
xvi
individuals could sin and not suffer painful guilt for their
sins, they might well just be selﬁsh beings that refuse to share
their gifts with the community. They might keep the ﬁre for
themselves.
The contribution of Prometheus’ sin to humanity led me
to the idea of “Good Guilt.” In common parlance, the words
“good” and “guilt” don’t belong together. Personal and clinical
experience has repeatedly conﬁrmed for me the useful role of
sin and guilt. I began to notice that there are times in our lives
when the experience of guilt actually was a signal of having
done something good, even essential to nurture us. While
the guilt probably did not feel like “Good Guilt” at the time
of transgression, the “sin” that caused the guilt is sometimes
viewed in retrospect as having brought something valuable to
our life. Examples might include divorces, separations from
partners and friends, giving up family-approved or family-
dictated careers, or even marriages that are opposed by one’s
family on the grounds of race, religion, gender, or social status.
It might also include the expression of qualities previously
rejected as unacceptable, like anger and selﬁshness or the
contra-sexual sides of ourselves. Later in life we may look at
guilt thus incurred in a different light.
Promethean Guilt
b
and Good Guilt, therefore, are the guilt
we incur for the sins we need to commit if we are to grow and
fulﬁll ourselves. Those sins that beneﬁt us could not be committed
without a creative, Promethean spirit that is supported by an

b
Jung talked about Promethean guilt in his Collected Works (CW7,
par. 243n). Here Jung was talking about the state of inﬂation that
analysands often reach when they begin to experience an increase
in consciousness as a result of insights that come from accessing the
collective unconscious. Jung goes on to say in the note that “every
step toward greater consciousness is a kind of Promethean guilt:
through knowledge, the gods are as it were robbed of their ﬁre, that
is, something that was the property of the unconscious powers is
torn out of its natural context and subordinated to the whims of
the conscious mind. The man who has usurped the new knowledge
suffers, however, a transformation or enlargement of consciousness,
which no longer resembles that of his fellow men.” This results in a
loneliness, the pain of which “is the vengeance of the Gods.”
xvii
obstinate and irreverent insolence toward authority that is
informed by a love of freedom.
As the myth of Prometheus demonstrates, therefore, there
can be an upside to the sins and the consequent guilt
c
we suffer
when we violate conventional boundaries. Galileo, Copernicus,
Socrates, Rosa Parks, and Susan B. Anthony were guilty in
this way. They gave much to society. But they suffered terribly
for their “sins.” So did many lesser lights whose individual
contributions to society were less dramatic but whose good may
be quite extraordinary. Whether we are poets or cobblers, we will
contribute the most to society if we commit the sins and bear
the guilt necessary to develop ourselves as fully as we can. We
can give society ﬁre or we can give society our more developed
selves as teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers or writers.
Guilt is the only feeling that is palpably experienced by
us as indisputable evidence that we have done something
“bad,” that we have somehow sinned. However, we can feel
guilty about a wide range of behaviors that do not ﬁt what
is commonly deﬁned as sin. Although some may try to deﬁne
sin as breaking only those rules prescribed by religion, our
experience in life asserts that this is not so. Intellectually, we
may make a distinction between ecclesiastical and secular rules
and laws, but emotionally we experience them as the same.
That is, our visceral feeling of guilt when breaking a religious
rule can be just like our feeling of guilt from breaking a secular
rule. We feel we have done something bad after violating either
one. At some deep level, it appears the psyche links violations
of any authority—divine, secular or parental—to the feeling
of guilt. This is probably because parents in our infancy are
the ﬁrst authority ﬁgures we encounter. They are also our ﬁrst

c
We do not know if Prometheus actually felt guilt; the myth of
Prometheus does not address that. But stealing from the gods is a
sin, as society ordinarily deﬁnes sin. By that deﬁnition, any state of
transgression against god or his commands is sin. Zeus’s punishment
of Prometheus must imply that he (Zeus) held Prometheus guilty of
something. If Prometheus did not feel guilt, it suggests that he was a
sociopath or that he was exempt from mortal rules by virtue of being
a demigod. But, Prometheus brought society something of great
value and that act in itself seems incompatible with sociopathy.
xviii
image of God.
d
We are challenged to distinguish between “sins”
against parents and sins against God. Jung believed that the
purpose of the institution of Godparents was to help us make
this distinction by helping us to see our parents as merely
human.
We are led, therefore, to a psychological deﬁnition of sin
that cuts a much broader swath than the conventional one. In
this book “sin” and the guilt that goes with it refers to anything
that makes us feel we are worthless or bad. This goes far beyond
the violation of canonical rules, admonitions of the church, or
even secular laws.
When we look at sin and guilt (or shame)
e
in this broader
way, the way we actually experience them psychologically, we

d
When I refer to God, I mean to include all the conceptions of God
that suggest the deepest unity that originates and sustains creation,
whether God is a he/she/it or whether a light, a word, a thought, a
person, pure reason, pure energy, a cell, a particle, a wave, a string,
a tendency toward natural selection, or a psychological construct—
among other possibilities.
e
Without some explanation and clarifying deﬁnition there could be
some confusion in my use of the words shame and guilt. I suspect
that some therapists would be troubled. Therefore, let me explain
my use of shame and guilt. First, I need to comment about the
distinction that some will draw between guilt and shame. At the
intellectual level, there certainly are distinctions to be made, and the
differences are signiﬁcant. However, the differences at the visceral
level are much harder to distinguish. At the gut level, we experience
these two as identical.
Brieﬂy, with guilt we are rejected for something we did or did
not do; with shame we are rejected for who we are. Guilt can be
explained as “experiencing myself as a bad person because I have
done something bad or because I have fantasized about doing
something bad.” Shame can be explained as meaning “I am bad
intrinsically.” It is a sense of humiliation in which I am devalued as
a person.
We feel guilt at transgressions of commandments and rules
imposed on us by various authorities. On the other hand, we feel
shame because we fall short of some ideal appearance: we are not
tall enough, or slim enough, or we are not pretty enough, or we have
a crooked nose.
xix
can see how they can be such a powerful deterrent to human
development. Much that is needed to live life fully is forbidden.
Collectively shared beliefs of what is right and wrong, as well as
widely varying individual beliefs of parents and other authority
ﬁgures, present us with an enormous moral mineﬁeld that must
be traversed. It is a ﬁeld that is fraught with the potential to
wound us, sometimes grievously, at every step.
At a deep level, the urge to sin may be identical with the urge
to individuate, a Jungian term for the psychological process by
which we become the unique person we are meant to be. Both
sin and individuation appear to be a common urge to follow
our own promptings rather than follow slavishly conventional
ones.
Society has and should have a powerful instinct to defend
its collective self. One could argue that society should demand
a high price for individuation, for becoming one’s self.
f
It
probably should cost much to purchase something as valuable
to the individual as that.

Guilt feels as though it is a violation of something God said;
shame feels as though it is related to something parents said.
However, because parents are the child’s ﬁrst images of God, to the
child the two feelings seem to come from the same pool. They get hit
with guilt and shame long before they are able to make these ﬁne
distinctions. For this reason, it seems to me that the visceral feelings
we experience from guilt and shame are identical. I am sometimes
suspicious that the ﬁne parsing of the technical and intellectual
differences between these two concepts can serve as a defense against
experiencing the underlying feeling. There may be highly developed
feeling individuals who can make this ﬁne differentiation in feeling
for themselves, but I think they are pretty rare. For this reason, I
lump guilt and shame together.
f
It is useful here to clarify the uses of the word self in this book. The self
with a lower case ‘s’ represents the psychic totality of the individual
and embraces both the conscious and unconscious minds. The self is
the center of this totality just as the ego is the center of the conscious
mind. The self is similar to the religious idea of God within. Self with
an upper case ‘S’ is a psychological representation that is similar to
the more general religious idea of God, or whatever one wishes to
call the creative mystery behind the totality of the universe.
xx
The community, however, also suffers if its individuals
are unable to complete themselves. Incomplete selves, like
incomplete buildings, have less to give to the community. The
community is a collection of individuals, and it can be only as
big as the sum of the individuals who comprise it.
Life inevitably confronts us with the Promethean dilemma:
Do we live our lives without ﬁre and the heat and light it
provides or do we sin and incur guilt to achieve the important
developments we need? The contribution virtue can make to
society must be acknowledged. There indeed are sins that are
destructive; there also are sins that beneﬁt. There are many
books about the need to remain upright; this one is about the
need to sin. A reason for writing this book is to comfort us in
the “sins” we inevitably need to commit in pursuit of personal
growth.
Making the case for sin and guilt is complicated by their
ambivalent role in human development. They can help us
or hurt us depending upon our needs at various stages of
growth. During the ﬁrst half of life, guilt can contribute to
our development by assisting in the creation of consciousness
g

and in the process of ego formation. Guilt is critical to the
formation of human consciousness because it is closely related
to the formation of the opposites in our psychic anatomy. Guilt
may aid our early development by helping us adapt in ways
necessary for a conventionally successful life. Guilt facilitates
adaptation by inhibiting our embrace of sins. In both halves
guilt plays an essential role in the operation of the psyche’s self-
regulating function that is similar to the body’s homeostatic
systems. Guilt appears to be a painful necessity.

g
Jung, Edinger and others have made the point that consciousness
depends upon the existence of polar opposites that are basic to the
architecture and anatomy of the psyche. The eating of the forbidden
fruit in the Garden of Eden is the mythical basis for this consciousness.
We lose our paradisiacal innocence when we become aware of the
opposites, symbolized as “good” and “evil.” Edinger pointed out:
“An understanding of the opposites is key to the psyche” (Edinger,
Edward F., The Mystery of the Coniunctio, Inner City Books, Toronto,
1995, page 14).
xxi
Despite its necessity, however, guilt can also interfere with
our growth. At midlife, the conﬂict between individual needs
and collective needs often expresses itself most powerfully as
a crisis of belief and identity. The result is the so-called midlife
crisis. The very guilt that can help us adapt in the ﬁrst half
of life may interfere with our development in the second half.
Some behaviors that were forbidden now become beneﬁcial. At
midlife, the urge toward individuation is often felt most strongly
and pursued most earnestly.
Whether we are in the ﬁrst or second half of life, guilt can
be ambivalent and difﬁcult to interpret. Guilty deeds that serve
our best interests are not always easy to distinguish from the
ones that don’t. A lot of guilt is meaningless no matter when we
incur it. The ambivalence of guilt led Jung to point out that “in
the last resort there is no good that cannot produce evil and no
evil that cannot produce good.”
2

Guilt disturbs our emotional and mental tranquility. Like
Prometheus, we suffer the pain of guilt, even if it was incurred
for something beneﬁcial. Promethean Guilt contains the seeds
of its own atonement. What is “sinfully” and “guiltily” acquired
is given back to the community as an expiation. There are also
other spiritual and psychological tools that can mitigate our
suffering. Because guilt is both painful and necessary, these
tools play an important role in softening the damage and the
hurt that guilt inevitably inﬂicts.
A real life human example of the Promethean Way is Rosa
Parks. A recent editorial in the Washington Post printed a tribute
to Rosa Parks, stating, “She had no army behind her. The law
was against her. Only a few people knew her name. But Rosa
Parks’ individual act of courage and determination on December
1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, ultimately changed a way
of life.” On that day she was on a bus and was asked to yield
her seat to a white man. With unsurpassed dignity she replied
simply and eloquently: “I’m a lady and I would like to remain
in my seat, please.” These words were a shot heard round the
world for the civil rights movement.
Initially, “A Montgomery court found her guilty. Local and
xxii
state leaders in Alabama … moved heaven and earth to keep
segregation laws on the books. Mrs. Parks was rewarded with
telephoned death threats and ﬁre bombings of her supporters’
houses. She and her husband lost their jobs.”
3
In the end her
deﬁance of the community’s mores helped bring great changes,
but at a high price, as the dominant powers of the community
deemed her “bad.” From these contributions alone, we could
conclude that “sin” can be accompanied by positive value.
Rosa Parks gave us grounds for hope that we too can act in the
face of overwhelming odds. By honoring her feelings and needs
she helped fulﬁll the collective needs of millions.

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PART I
SIN AND PSYCHOLOGICAL GROWTH

INDIVIDUATION
The Jungian model for psychological growth and development
is called individuation. It is the process by which we achieve
our unique potential as an individual. All psychological growth
is difﬁcult and often painful. The Jungian way, however, is
especially so because it requires us to sin and bear guilt. The
path is strewn with guilt mines. We must step on many of them
to complete our journey. The guilt that lies along this path
creates a formidable deterrent.
Individuation describes a person’s “process of personal
growth, of becoming himself, whole, indivisible, and distinct. Key
attributes that describe the process of individuation emphasize:
(1) the goal of the process is the development of the personality;
(2) it presupposes and includes collective relationships (i.e., it
does not occur in a state of isolation); and (3) it involves a degree
of opposition to social norms that have no validity. The more
an individuating person’s life has previously been shaped by
the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality.”
4

Jung, of course, clearly saw the conﬂict between his
developmental concept of individuation and collective
mores. He knew that we couldn’t individuate without sinning
and incurring guilt. He explains the consequences in a brief
passage:
Individuation and collectivity is a pair of opposites, two
divergent destinies. They are related to one another by
CHAPTER 1
Psychological Growth and Development:
A Jungian Model
Guilt with a Twist 26
guilt... Individuation cuts one off from personal conformity
and hence from collectivity... It means stepping over into
solitude, into the cloister of the inner self… Since the breaking
of personal conformity means the destruction of an aesthetic
and moral ideal, the ﬁrst step in individuation is a tragic
guilt... The accumulation of guilt demands expiation...
Every [further]step in individuation creates new guilt and
necessitates new expiation.
5

Jung was clear and emphatic that there is a high and demanding
price of guilt to be paid when one gives up conventional life
and travels the path of individuation. We cannot grow without
suffering guilt. It’s a path that requires courage.
But Jung also offered ideas as to how this guilt might be
redeemed:
[The individuating person]... must offer a ransom in place
of himself, that is, he must bring forth values, which are an
equivalent substitute for his absence in the collective, personal
sphere. Without this production of values, ﬁnal individuation
is immoral and-more than that-suicidal...
Not only has society a right, it also has a duty to condemn the
individuant if he fails to create equivalent values, for he is a
deserter... Individuation remains a pose so long as no values
are created.
The individual is obliged by the collective demands to purchase
his individuation at the cost of an equivalent work for the
beneﬁt of society.
h
Only by accomplishing an equivalent is
one exempt from the conventional, collective path. A person
[who individuates] must accept the contempt of society until
such time as he has accomplished his equivalent.
6

Jung’s way is essentially the Promethean way where “sin”
eventually leads to something good for humanity. In order
to accomplish our equivalent, we have to turn inward to the
unconscious. We have to search there for what needs to be
developed within ourselves in order to become the complete
h
Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed similar ideas in his essay,
“Compensation.” He writes, “A wise man will know it is the part
of prudence to face every claimant and pay every just demand on
your time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay.”(Emerson, Ralph
Waldo, Essays, New York, Houghton Mifﬂin Co., 1883)
Chapter 1 27
persons we are called to be. Only then do we have the capacity
to give back the most we are capable of giving.
A similar idea is presented in Plato’s The Republic, in the
allegory of the cave, where the philosopher king goes away
to the cave, the symbolic equivalent of the unconscious, and
returns to give his society the wisdom and the fundamental
forms underlying life that he found there. Analogies are the
vision quests of the shaman and medicine men of the Native
Americans and other primitive tribal societies, who enter the
world of the unconscious and bring back knowledge and skills
that beneﬁt their people. In Greek mythology, Prometheus went
far away to where the gods lived, stole ﬁre, and brought it back.
He offended the gods and incurred guilt and punishment for his
deed. But his guilty deed brought great beneﬁt to mankind.
GOOD GUILT
It is difﬁcult to “get one’s arms around” the seeming contradiction
that the very individuation that suggests to Jungians that we are
doing something good in our lives is the same individuation that
produces tragic guilt and makes us feel we are doing something
bad. A prolonged effort to understand and, if possible, resolve
this apparent contradiction eventually led me to a concept I
came to call “Good Guilt.”
As I indicated earlier in the Overview, in common parlance,
the words “good,” “sin” and “guilt” really don’t belong together.
However, at some point I began to notice that the experience
of guilt, the feeling of having done something bad in our lives,
sometimes later, in retrospect, turns out to be something good,
even essential.
I also began to notice that the lives of many “sinners” we
now call great are luminous models for the idea that some guilt
may actually be “Good Guilt.” Their “sins” produced a lot of
good for the societies in which they lived and, sometimes, for the
entire world. A short list would include Joan of Arc, Mahatma
Guilt with a Twist 28
Gandhi, Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, Martin Luther King,
Alfred Kinsey, Betty Friedan, Darwin, Solzhenitsyn, Susan B.
Anthony, and other audacious people who pushed themselves
far outside conventional fences. Life is clearly full of examples
of “bad” people giving something good to society. As Meister
Eckhart wrote, “God is willing to bear the brunt of sins and
often winks at them, mostly sending them to people for whom
he has prepared some high destiny. See! Who was dearer to our
Lord or more intimate with him than his apostles? Not one of
them but fell on mortal sin and all were mortal sinners.”
7
We
could add King David and Solomon, as well as St. Augustine to
this list.
We might better serve ourselves if we could look at people
and their ideas in terms of their overall contribution to society,
not just in terms of their apparent morality. Jonathan Yardley, in
his critique of A Life in Literature, a book about Edmund Wilson,
noted that Wilson’s personal life was not entirely admirable by
conventional standards. Yardley quoted Wilson’s fourth wife as
saying, “When I read his work I forgive him all his sins.”
8
For
her, at least, what he gave back was sufﬁcient compensation
to earn forgiveness and appreciation. Another example, Louis
Kahn, whose contributions to American architecture are widely
recognized, also led a personal life that strayed signiﬁcantly
from convention. He was a difﬁcult man to work or to live with,
but his wives, lovers, and colleagues forgave him because of
what he gave back in the form of his art.
9

An example of what can happen when we judge people
only on the basis of their morality, rather than a balanced
judgment that includes their contributions to society, can be
seen in the case of Alan Turing. He’s an example of how the
moral judgment itself may be more of a threat to society than
the behavior of the person being judged. Turing’s case is an
example of how collective morality can punish those that
society needs. It’s the way collective morality can shoot itself
in the foot.
Turing, according to a recent New Yorker article,
10
was chieﬂy
responsible for breaking the German Enigma Code during World
Chapter 1 29
War II. It was an achievement that was critically important to
saving Britain and, perhaps, the free world from defeat. His
code-breaking work also led him to create the blueprint for
modern computers.
Before he died, however, Turing was convicted of “gross
indecency” for having a homosexual affair. This “sinner” could
have been perceived instead as a national hero if his code
breaking had not remained a classiﬁed secret until well after
his conviction.
Turing’s is Promethean guilt; although his “sin” was not
related to the beneﬁt he brought to society. He offended society’s
rules, but produced something of indispensable value to the very
society he offended. One can imagine that the ideals that led to
the punishment of Turing represented a much bigger threat to
the community than a homosexual affair. We can legitimately
ask: If it is society’s welfare that we want to promote, what does
it better, the enforcement of the ideal that put Turing in prison
or the achievements of Turing and others like him? It could
be argued that Turing’s fate is an example of a religious ideal
that is reﬂected in our public laws, but is absurd. Such laws
can punish many who also help preserve the very society that
condemns them.
Many scientiﬁc breakthroughs and other good ideas are not
so controversial that the authors and advocates are rejected.
These new things simply enter the mainstream without disabling
controversy. These ﬁne people make enormous contributions,
but so do many of the so-called sinners. The problem for new
ideas arises mainly when they run counter to conventional and
religious ideologies. This sparks a controversy. Stem cell research
is currently bogged down in religious controversy. Spirited and
courageous outsiders may need to come to the rescue.
It is also important to point out that the people who live
most of their lives in a fundamentally decent, conventional
way are not entirely free of guilt. Walking through life’s
ﬁeld of guilt-inducing mines without striking one is virtually
impossible. They may even feel the guilt of unlived life. Some
people incur much less guilt than others, and some appear
Guilt with a Twist 30
decent and conventional only because they have not been
caught. The latter may be the only ones who know they have
“struck a mine,” but they feel secret guilt. Some of the things
that happen and the experiences we have cause us to question
whether those who are considered devout behave any more
morally than anyone else. Still, even the apparently innocent
ones need comfort for their guilt. Some of what they give back
may be motivated by an intuition that giving back helps to
resolve their guilt.
In summary, there are a lot of gutsy people who were viewed
as heretics at the time of their contributions. They were not
acceptable to the dominant ﬁgures, who made the rules and
had the power. These heretics—like Galileo, Socrates, and Rosa
Parks—were condemned and often punished. They were loved
and accepted only by other outsiders. In fact, the feeling of
being an outsider is akin to feeling guilt, and it is the outsiders
who are often the producers of new ideas. These heretics of
their day are considered heroes today; they were not executors
of the existing order. They brought fresh new ideas to the world
and they suffered for it. Fortunately for us, their ideas survived
and, eventually, were brought “inside the fence” where they
could add to or improve existing knowledge. The conclusion
seems inescapable. If these people had not committed their
“sins,” as deﬁned by the standards of the societies in which they
lived, the world would have been deprived of their important
contributions. And the concept of Good Guilt would have less
meaning.
Our fear of guilt often prevents us from doing things we
are not supposed to do. We are afraid to “go there” because
there is a big price to pay for going there. There is also a big
price to pay for not going there. George Bernard Shaw wrote,
“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
11
I am not sure that all
great truths began that way, but we know that a great many
did—i.e. the earth is not the center of the universe. If the fear
of guilt had been completely effective and if brave people had
been unable to ﬁnd some way to bear it, the world would have
Chapter 1 31
missed many of the great ideas produced by those who violated
the rules of their communities to make their contributions.
English historian Arnold Toynbee in his classic A Study of
History noted that older civilizations that eventually failed had
a propensity to keep trying things that in the past had been
successful, but that were no longer appropriate.
12

Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
expresses a similar idea:
Schism in the soul, schism in body social, will not be resolved
by any scheme of return to the good old days, or by programs
guaranteed to render an ideal projected future, or even by the
most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the
deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death—the
birth not of the old thing again but of something new. Within
the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to
experience long survival—a continuous recurrence of birth to
nullify the unremitting recurrences of death.
13

Campbell knew that declining civilizations were often saved
in the end by those who dared to look outside the box, to go
to the “other,” which is unacceptable to those charged with
preserving the structures inside the fence. If we have succumbed
to these limitations, we have limited what sacred ground is. If
we have limited what God is, we have limited what our self is
or can become without sinning. We must search in forbidden
territory to grow, partly because we have created gods and
sacred boundaries out of false Gods (e.g., parents, preachers,
teachers, doctors, and bosses) or out of capitalism, communism,
or formal religions.
The preceding discussion is intended to explain how I
arrived at the concept of Good Guilt. Simply put, Good Guilt is
the guilt that we feel when we follow the path of individuation,
which leads us outside the conventional fence into the realm of
behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that are unacceptable.
In the struggle between the conﬂicting human tendencies
to be both “good” and “bad,” there is a problem if we try to be
exclusively good. We may, by staying inside the fence, avoid
being castigated by society. We may also avoid castigating
Guilt with a Twist 32
ourselves with self-punishing guilt. In the process, however, we
also avoid large parts of our self. In so doing, we may please
parents and society, but sin against our self. Nevertheless, if
we are going to be acceptable to the collective, and to all those
who identify with it, we cannot reveal our larger selves; we can
express only our smaller egos. That is the dilemma. What we
would like, of course, is to truly be our selves and be accepted.
We want to have our cake and eat it, too, but the collective,
conventional values make that impossible. It forces us to choose
between becoming our authentic selves, or being accepted by
the conventional world. We must choose between being insiders
or outsiders, between being good sons or prodigal sons.
An important lesson we need to learn is simply this: If we
are feeling guilty, especially in the second half of life, we should
not be too quick to conclude or interpret that those feelings of
guilt necessarily mean that we are doing something “bad.”
We may actually be doing something “good” for our own
growth as well as society’s. The guilt feelings always need to be
acknowledged and always, and I emphasize always, need to be
examined and evaluated on their merits and in accordance with
one’s conscience. But it is important to note that the meaning
of guilt is probably far more complicated than we have ever
been taught. It may be at midlife that we discover this most
poignantly.
In the psychic triad of sin, guilt, and repentance, sin lies
more behind the urge for individual development. We build
ourselves so that we have something valuable to give. Guilt
and repentance lie more behind the urge to give one’s fuller self
back to the community. Ultimately, the community’s growth
depends upon the growth of the individual. In this psychological
and spiritual sequence, guilt is the painful bridge, the connector
that leads from sin to repentance to atonement. Without guilt,
or some other psychic mechanism that causes pain when one
sins, there probably would be no atonement, no urge to improve
or to give back as expiation.
The views expressed above, my professional experience as
an analyst, and my own personal life, have led me to conclude
Chapter 1 33
that sin and the guilt that goes with it are sacred, that the sacred
and the profane are but two sides of a single underlying reality
whose meaning depends upon the existence of each other. It is
the unbearable suffering from our sins, from our profanity, that
leads us on a spiritual journey in search of the sacred, in search
of whatever we may have come to call God. We seek God in the
hope of ﬁnding some answer to our profound suffering.
All recovered alcoholics I have known have suffered hugely
from guilt. Almost without exception, they attribute their
transformation and their healing to a spiritual experience that
involves some kind of connection to what they call a higher
power. Based on my work with alcoholics, they also will say
that the spiritual experience of being saved from alcohol was
so powerful that they can actually feel grateful for the sins and
the suffering that led them to that experience. Somehow they
sense that without the sins and the guilt they would not have
found their higher power. They probably would not even have
searched so desperately for an answer. For them, then, the sin
becomes sacred because it was the sin that led them to God, as
they understand him. It appears that God wants a relationship
with humans and, one way or another, will have it, even if it
requires inﬂicting pain.
The dream of a patient illustrates how close the sacred and
profane may be.
I am in my college dorm room studying. My girlfriend is there.
She was promiscuous before I met her and I am suspecting she
still is. She leaves the room to go some place. I am suspicious
that she is going to meet up and have sex with another guy.
After she leaves, I follow her. She eventually comes to a plaza
that is dark and disappears into the dark shadows. I follow
her into the shadow in the direction she went. When I come
to the point that I lost sight of her, I see a statue. She has
somehow merged into it. It is the statue of the Pieta.
The dream unites two opposites—the sacred and the profane.
They become one, merged in the image of the Pieta. In men,
these are experienced as the whore and the Virgin Mary. In
male consciousness, feelings are split off from the underlying
unity that the dream expresses. They experience the two images
Guilt with a Twist 34
as separate. This split leads men to have a “pure” sweetheart
whom they love romantically, but do not have sex with; rather
they have sex with the “loose” girl. This is unfortunate for
women. A woman’s reality is actually more like the dream,
where she is both. For women, it can create a painful dilemma.
She wants to be her real self. She wants to be both—to be loved
and respected and passionately fucked. She cannot live her
completeness, both sides of her duality, any more than he can,
when he splits them in two. Christ’s relationship to and love for
Mary Magdalene joins the sacred and the profane just as the
image of the Pieta in the dream does.
At a deep, inner level the sacred and the profane are united by
an underlying reality that acknowledges their interdependence
and the truth that one has no meaning without the other.
Without the contrast provided by the profane we could not
become conscious of the sacred. We hide our sins for the same
reason that we hide and keep out of sight what is most valuable
so that thieves will not break in and steal our treasure. When
we become conscious of how sacred our sins are, we can bring
them into the light and share their sacredness and their worth.
Sharing secrets is an act of intimacy. The sharing connects us
to others and is a major cure for loneliness. Folks in Alcoholics
Anonymous (AA) learned that a long time ago. Jung said that
the shadow, where we hide our sins in secret, is 90% pure gold.
The sins we commit eventually catapult us onto a path that
leads us to psychological as well as spiritual development. The
path leads us to our self, a Jungian term for the totality of our
being and a psychological construct for god within. It also leads
us to pain and suffering that we seek to assuage.
Churches that denounce sin might notice, if they read
sacred texts honestly, that what they are denouncing is the very
thing that would bring people close to God. The New Testament
is quite clear that Christ hung out with sinners rather than with
the righteous.
The propinquity of the sacred to the profane is not a new
idea. It is not only contained in our sacred texts but also in
great literature. Thomas Mann’s book, The Holy Sinner, portrays
Chapter 1 35
the sacredness of incest that is forbidden by our most powerful
taboos. Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, portrays the sacred and
profane side by side in the person of a clergyman. We may also
sense the truth of the words in Delbert McClinton’s song, I Had
a Real Good Time: “You learn a whole lot more about life from
the things you’re not supposed to do.”

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIENCE
OF SIN AND GUILT
Guilt is the only feeling that is palpably experienced by us as
indisputable evidence that we have done something “bad,” that
we have somehow “sinned.” Although some may deﬁne sin as
breaking only those rules prescribed by religion, our subjective
experience in life asserts that this is not so. Intellectually, we may
make a distinction between ecclesiastical, secular, and parental
rules, but viscerally and emotionally we often experience them
identically. For example, failure—in relationships, work, or art—
makes us feel guilty and ashamed
i
emotionally, the same way
we feel when we have sinned. We feel we are worthless or bad,
even though we have violated no divine or moral laws. Almost
any loss of control—whether of anger, appetites of various
kinds, or of our bowels—causes us to feel guilty. Technically we
have not sinned, but we might as well have because we suffer
as if we had sinned. That is, our feeling of guilt from breaking
a religious rule can be identical to our feeling of guilt from
breaking a secular or parental rule. We feel bad for violating
either one. Thus, psychologically the guilt we experience from
violating any authority triggers a feeling that is identical
CHAPTER 2
How Guilt Deters Psychological
Growth and Development

i
See footnote e in the Overview for an explanation of the uses of
these terms in this book.
Guilt with a Twist 38
to the feeling we have when we have actually sinned in the
conventional sense of the word. This identity of feeling happens
to us psychologically because parents are our ﬁrst image of
God as well as our ﬁrst authority ﬁgures. As infants, out of our
conscious awareness, we have lumped these three entities (i.e.,
parental, secular, and divine authorities) together in a single
identity. This identiﬁcation remains unconscious all our lives,
unless dreams or other sources of unconscious contents reveal it
to us. Much of our moral compass is shaped by parental values
that are inculcated in us from a very early age. As a result of
this early conditioning (and our identiﬁcation of them with God
and authority), we experience guilt from transgression of any
authority exactly as we do “sin,” which is technically deﬁned as
an infringement of divine law.
When “sin” and “guilt” are so deﬁned, they cut a
broad swath that envelops a widely varying catalogue of
transgressions communicated directly and openly, by words, by
disapproving gestures or, more subtly, by disapproving looks
from authority ﬁgures (e.g., parents and grandparents). These
actions of disapproval—words, looks, or gestures—deﬁne for us,
particularly in childhood, those thoughts, feelings, and actions
that are “bad,” and we interpret this to mean we are “bad” if
we do any of these things. To be “bad” is to be “sinful.” These
collectively shared and institutionally sanctioned beliefs of what
is right and wrong, as well as widely varying individual and
subjective beliefs of parents and other authority ﬁgures, present
us with an enormous moral mineﬁeld that must be traversed
if we are to develop and fulﬁll ourselves. It is a ﬁeld that is
fraught with the potential to wound us, sometimes grievously,
at every step.
When, therefore, we look at sin
j
and guilt in this broader
way, the way we actually experience them psychologically, we
j
Edward Edinger in his book, The Mystery of the Coniunctio, talks about
the broad deﬁnition of sin in a somewhat different way. He writes,
“The devil is a personiﬁcation of all those aspects of an individual’s
psychology which contradict one’s conscious, ideal self-image and
Chapter 2 39
can see their powerful underlying inﬂuence embedded in our
religious and cultural soil, and we can understand why they
can be such powerful deterrents to human development. They
can block our development—emotionally and intellectually—
because much that is needed to live life fully is forbidden.
Parents and society demand that we tread authorized paths,
that we think, feel, and act in ways that are acceptable to them.
Guilt, with its potential to inﬂict pain and suffering, is a sentry
that guards the authorized paths and its boundaries.
Dreams can at times reveal to us an important part of the
process by which individual parents shape our relationship to
sin and guilt through their inﬂuence on our perceptions of what
is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. We see this in
the following dream of a well-adapted middle-aged man who
felt trapped and imprisoned in a conventional and suffocating
life.
I am at an amateur play watching the stage. There are two
stark ﬁgures. The Queen/Mother is on the left on a simple
throne. She has on a gown with plain and simple lines. The
King/Son is on the right, also on a simple throne. The mother
reads from a page and the son repeats it. The lines are poetic
and nice but not original. They are both saying lines written
by someone else.
While we are wired with the capacity to feel guilt,
k
we are, as the
dream above portrays, taught what to feel guilty about. Until
which therefore must be repressed. For a conventional Christian
consciousness, the devil will be all that is unChrist like—sexuality,
power, self-interest, and material desires as opposed to spiritual
ones.”(Edinger, Edward F., Melville’s Moby-Dick, Inner City Books,
Toronto, 1995, p. 115)
k
If we believed, as the Creationists do, that we are created in the image
of God, it would not take a huge leap to suspect that God himself
contains guilt and the behaviors that go with it. Where else would
guilt come from, if not from the source that created us? This dark
side is evident not only in the cruelty and harshness often inﬂicted
by nature upon humans and animals but also in the cruel behavior
attributed to God in the Bible. We might, for example, ask those who
were not allowed to board the Ark before the ﬂood. Or we might gain

Guilt with a Twist 40
such a dream appears, however, we are often quite unconscious
of the degree to which parental and collective values are
instilled in us from an early age, how scripted our lives really
are, and how rigidly these scripts can circumscribe and limit
our thoughts and our behavior. When we depart from the script
and/or the path, we incur guilt.
We can also see how our Judaeo/Christian creation myths
shape our notions of what is acceptable and unacceptable.
These myths tell us that in the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth. Soon thereafter, sin and guilt were born,
as Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, became
conscious, and thereby acquired the capacity to distinguish
between good and evil, right and wrong.
14
Since creation, then,
it appears that sin and guilt have been frequent and familiar
guests in the psychic house of most of mankind.
It is as if a barbed wire fence of guilt is laid around us for
the purpose of restricting our thoughts, feelings, and actions to
those that are acceptable to parents and the collective society
in which we live. An individual will be loved, admired, and
accepted by the dominant authorities of the collective society
some insight from God’s treatment of Job. Any parent who treated
his child the way God treated Job might get an uninvited visit from
Social Services or be jailed. Even Jesus might have been justiﬁed
in questioning God’s behavior. One could, at least, imagine Jesus
asking why, if the father thinks sacriﬁce is such a wonderful thing,
he did not sacriﬁce himself, instead of his son. A father dying in the
place of his son could be perceived as a more worthy kind of offering.
Sacriﬁcing sons, instead of themselves, in order to preserve or redeem
their kingdoms and their power, is what elders do now, for example,
when they encourage young people to become suicide bombers.
Sacriﬁcing sons is what the patriarchal elders in charge of societies
have always done when they decided to declare war. God of the Bible
is a model for this patriarchal behavior. But maybe God and the
elders do feel guilty, when they behave cruelly or unmercifully. Jung
suspected that Yahweh’s unjust treatment of Job led Yahweh to feel
guilty and atone by creating Christ, a God with considerably more
apparent compassion than Yahweh himself. The book of Revelation,
however, might call into question this view of Christ as being only
compassionate and loving.

Chapter 2 41
only if one stays within the barbed wire fence. Much of what
we are taught to believe is unsavory or unacceptable is rejected
and cast into the shadow. The shadow, in Jungian terms,
represents all that lies outside the fence, everything we wish
not to be. Unfortunately, we can reject and store in the shadow
a lot of good stuff that we need either now or later, like creative
gifts that are discouraged by parents because they are deemed
impractical or distasteful. Therefore, if we venture outside the
fence, we experience guilt.
So it’s tricky to talk about guilt partly because of the
enormously diverse childhood inﬂuences that shaped our
experience of it. These inﬂuences could differ hugely depending
upon the way sin was deﬁned over the ages by parents, other
authorities, cultures, religions, and epochs.
There is no single touchstone of orthodoxy that we can all
embrace. The meaning of sin 100 years ago is considerably
different from the meaning of sin today. People today often
claim to be more liberated, but it is likely that their liberation
is illusory. While the speciﬁc items in the catalogue may be
different in many ways, the catalogue is huge.
A MODEST CATALOGUE OF SIN AND GUILT
The impediment that the psychological experience of guilt and
sin poses to our growth becomes obvious, when we examine
the many things we have been taught to feel guilty about. It is
unnecessary to recite all of the potential causes and sources that,
like land mines, dot the ground we daily tread. Nevertheless,
this brief recitation is more than sufﬁcient to convince us of
guilt’s threat to our development. As we graze through the
modest catalogue of guilt that follows, we might ask what life
would be like if we did avoid all of these mines. It is difﬁcult
to imagine any concept of psychological growth that could
Guilt with a Twist 42
materialize in any authentic life without stepping on some of
these guilt-inducing mines.
Some of the mines are visible and well known to us; others
are buried beneath the surface and out of conscious sight.
Conscious causes of guilt are probably in the minority. A mine
for one person may be harmless to another.
The catalogue of sinful, guilty actions extends into the far
reaches of our thoughts and behaviors. Daily, in my practice,
people recall long-forgotten infractions, and they suffer from
revulsion at remembered behaviors like: “I told on a friend to a
teacher,” or “I drank too much and made a fool of myself,” or
“I sucked my uncle’s penis,” or “I binged and broke my vow to
diet,” and on and on.
Or a woman is pregnant, she trips and falls, she loses her
baby, and she feels guilty. She feels that she has done something
wrong, that she was careless. Almost any apparent loss of control
can lead to shame and guilt, whether it is overeating, drinking
to excess, inappropriate behavior or remarks (e.g., belching), or
wearing a dress that is “too short.” Incontinence of bowels or
emotions can lead to guilt. We feel guilty about our doubts and
uncertainties, our lack of self-conﬁdence. We feel guilty about
being sick and missing work.
Even with the more relaxed attitudes found today, we can
feel guilty about sex. We can feel guilty about impotence,
infertility, or failure to perform in various ways. We can feel
guilty about masturbation.
Then, we can feel guilty if we work too much or too little.
The list goes on and on to include feelings of guilt about being
late, underachieving, compromising, not having a career or
having one, leaving our children with nannies or daycare
(so-called “mommy guilt”), expressing anger or aggression,
being assertive or not being assertive enough, being gay, being
negative, expressing masculine traits when you are a woman
or feminine qualities when you are a man, not making enough
money or working mainly for money, changing jobs or careers
or feeling stuck in them and afraid to move on, not having
children, having children with birth defects, or children who
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END NOTES
1
Huxley, Aldous, from the poem “Orion”, THE CICADAS AND OTHER
POEMS. Copyright @ 1931, 1958 by Aldous Huxley. Reprinted by
permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the Estate of Aldous
Huxley.
2
Jung C. G. (1954), Collected Works (CW), Edited by Gerhard Adler et
al. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton University Press, vol. 12, par. 36.
3
Washington Post, 26 October 2005, editorial on Rosa Parks.
4
A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, Andrew Samuels, Bani
Shorter, and Fred Plaut, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and New
York, p. 76.
5
Ibid., Jung, C.G., Collected Works, vol. 18, pars. 1094–1099.
6
Ibid., Jung, C.G.
7
Ibid., volume 10, paragraph 440. As quoted by Jung.
8
Washington Post, 4–10 September 2005, Yardley, Jonathan. In Annals
of American Literature, Edmund Wilson Towers Above Everyone
Else, Book World, vol. 35, no. 35. p. 2.
9
My Architect, Susan Rose Behr (producer), N. Kahn (writer/director),
2003, New Yorker Films.
10
New Yorker, 6 February 2006, p. 84, Code Breaker by Jim Holt.
11
Shaw, G.B., “Annajanska.”
12
Toynbee, Arnold J. (1934), A Study of History, Oxford University
Press, pp. 913–951.
13
Campbell, J. (1973), The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, p. 16.
14
Holy Bible (1969), The New Scoﬁeld Reference Bible, Authorized
King James Version, New York, Oxford University Press, Genesis
1:1–3.
15
Jung, C.G. (1968), Man and His Symbols, New York, Random House
(Dell Division), p.170.
16
These ideas about midlife are summaries and restatements of many
of Jung’s ideas found especially in Collected Works 7, pars. 114-116,
CW 4, pars. 415-418, CW 8, essay, “The Stages of Life,” pars. 772-
795, CW 5, pars 458-459, CW 16, pars. 110-474. I read many of these
pieces years ago and realize that some of the “paraphrases” may
be direct quotes. But, because of the limitations of the old indexes
or the absence of indexes as in his letters, and the unavailability of
Guilt with a Twist 242
the CW on discs, I was unable to verify at times whether something
was a quote or a paraphrase.
17
Ibid., Holy Bible, Matthew 21:42.
18
Bauer, Jan (1993), Impossible Love, Dallas, Spring Publications, p.
103.
19
Ibsen, Henrik, The Wild Duck, p. 153, in Four Plays, Simon & Schuster,
New York, 2005.
20
Jung, C.G., 1973, Letters, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, vol. 1,
pp. 479ff.
21
Asper, Kathrin, lecture presented at C.G. Jung Institute-Zurich,
11 June 1990. Also see her book, The Abandoned Child, New York,
Fromm International Publishing, 1993.
22
Ibsen, Henrik (1961), The Wild Duck: And Other Plays, New York,
Modern Library.
23
Ibid., act 4.
24
The Unmasking of the Piltdown Man, BBC News at News.bbc.co.uk
detailed explanation, also found in Wikepedia on the web.
25
Ball, Timothy F. (2005) “The Scientiﬁc Method—How Science
Proceeds from Theory,” prepared by Professor Ball for www. spiked
science. Dr. Ball is coauthor of Eighteenth - Century Naturalists of
Hudson Bay.
26
Ibid.
27
A Taste of Others, Jaoui, Agnes (writer/director), New York, Artistic
License Films/Miramax Zoe (2001).
28
For more detailed discussions of the transcendent function, see
CW 18par1554, essay The Transcendent Function. Discussion of the
transcendent function is also found in CW 6, 7, 8, 9i, 10, 11, and
14.
29
Washington Post, 16 September 2005, M. O’Sullivan, “Sticking to His
Guns,” Weekend Section, pp. 41, 43.
30
Neumann, Erich, Origins and History of Consciousness, Princeton
University Press, 1973, p. 404.
31
Nietzsche, Friedrich, from Brainy Quote, www.brainyquote.com.
32
Wirt, William, Life and Character of Patrick Henry, 1817. See also
Paine, Thomas, Common Sense, 1776.
33
CW 14, par. 206
34
Shakespeare, William, Complete Works of William Shakespeare,
Grosset & Dunlap, New York.
35
Puccini, G., Tosca.
End Notes 243
36
Crash Paul Haggis (director/writer/producer), Lion’s Gate Films
(2005).
37
Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean (director), Robert A. Harris and Sam
Spiegel (producers), Columbia Pictures (1962).
38
A Civil Action, Steven Zaillian (director), Walt Disney Studios
(1999).
39
Kohut, Heinz (1983), The Restoration of the Self, New York,
International Universities Press, especially pp. 53-54, 10, 17-18, 40,
158 and 289.
40
Out of Africa, Sydney Pollack (Director), Sydney Pollack and Kim
Jorgenson (producers), Universal Studios (1985).
41
Jung, C.G., CW 2, Part I, Studies in Word Association, par. 1–1014.
42
Neumann, Erich (1974), Art and the Creative Unconscious, Princeton,
The Princeton University Press, p. 181.
43
Einstein’s Big Idea (2005), PBS Films, WETA, Nova, November 11,
2005.
44
Washington Post, 23 October 2005, Mark Leibovich, “Back Stage No
More,” sec. A, p.1.
45
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ﬁghter command.
46
Ibid., Holy Bible, John 1:1–3.
47
Random House Dictionary of the English Language [2nd edition,
unabridged] and Encyclopedia Mythica.
48
Jung, C.G., CW5, par: 332-335 and CW16, par. 419.
49
Neumann, Erich (1974), Art and the Creative Unconscious, Princeton,
The Princeton University Press, pp. 181 and following, especially
185,191 and 192.
50
Ibid.
51
McGahern, John (2007), All Will Be Well: A Memoir, New York, First
Vintage International Edition. P. 217-218.
52
Bowlby, John (1979), The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds,
New York and London, Routledge. This paragraph paraphrases and
summarizes ideas contained in pp.3–14 and pp. 138, 157–159. See
also: Bowlby, John (1988), A Secure Base, London, Routledge.
53
PBS program, Imagining America: Icons of 20th Century American Art.
Aired December 28, 2005.
54
Washington Post, May 23, 2005, Linton Weeks, Style, pp. 1-2, article
entitled “Count Him In.”
55
Sondheim, Stephen (2000), Sunday in the Park with George, New York,
Applause Theater and Cinema Books, p. 55.
Guilt with a Twist 244
56
Harvard Magazine, (May-June 2005), ‘Literary Warrior’, by Craig
Lambert, pp. 38-43.
57
Washington Post, 14 May 2006, Style, sec. C, p. 1 and 3, by Marcia
Davis.
58
Washington Post, 16 May 2006, Style, sec. C, p. 1.
59
Holy Bible, Matthew 19:24.
60
Washington Post, 11 September 2007, Patricia Sullivan, Metro Sec.
N., p7.
61
Holy Bible, Deuteronomy 26:2.
62
The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo (2005), PBS Home Video, Daylight
Films and WETA, Amy Stechler (producer).
63
Washington Post, 29 January 2006, Blake Gopnik, Arts, sec. N, p. 1, 6.
64
Ibid., endnote 49 above.
65
Neumann, Erich, Origins and History of Consciousness, Princeton
University Press, 1973, p. 404.
66
Holy Bible, Matthew 5:48.
67
Washington Post, 5 March 2006, “The Demands of Love”, by Suki
Casanave, Book World, p. 1, 3.
68
Ibid. Holy Bible, Luke 15:4–7.
69
Jung, C.G. (1972), Collected Works, vol. 7, Princeton University
Press, par. 93.
70
This remark was told to me by one of my supervising analysts in
Zurich who had known Jung. I am pretty sure that I have seen this
among Jung’s writings but could not ﬁnd the reference.
71
Jung, C.G., From MEMORIES, DREAMS, AND REFLECTIONS, edited by
Aniela Jaffe, translated by Richard & Clara Winton, copyright @
1961, 1962, 1963, and renewed 1989,1990,1991 by Random House,
Inc. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random
House, Inc. p. 36.
72
Ibid, p. 39.
73
Ibid., Memories, Dreams and Reﬂections, p. 69.
74
CW 14, 206.
75
Washington Post, February 29, 2007, “Author Shaped Lens for
Viewing U.S. History,” Adam Bernstein, Sec. A, p.8.
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